Printing Transplantable Lungs

This piece is about a work in progress, with likely a long way to go. United Therapeutics (Manchester, NH) shares an R&D building with Dean Kamen’s BioFab USA, and both are working on tissue printing. UT’s aim in the long run is to combine stem cell technology, 3-D scaffold printing, and recellularization to make transplantable lungs. At present, they have a collagen model of a windpipe. Whether it’s lungs, livers, kidneys, skin or hearts, an essential issue is the micro level at which a printer can lay down living cells, which is part of the reason NASA has a $300,000 prize for the first printing of living tissue that’s one centimeter thick. MORE